Permanent, Not Private, Equity

Dan Doriani: Hello, and welcome to Working with Dan Doriani, a podcast where we explore faith, work, culture, and the way believers can make a difference in their corner of the world.

Hello, everybody. Today we have Brent Beshore, an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of a firm called Permanent Equity. For some people, the minute they hear the word equity, they start to shiver, because they think, “Is that like private equity? Dan, I thought you were a good guy. Why would you have a private equity person on your podcast? Aren’t they scoundrels who strip wealth and destroy corporations?” Brent, you founded and run Permanent Equity. What is it? What do you do? I’ve got a book you wrote called The Messy Marketplace, about buying and running companies and things of that nature. We’re glad you’re here. Tell us who you are and what your company does, and we’ll get into your faith a little later.

Brent Beshore: Well, Dan, thanks for having me. I mean, we are scoundrels. We’re the only people who look up to lawyers in reputation.

Dan Doriani: Maybe we should just conclude in prayer.

Buy, Lever, Strip, and Flip [00:55]

Brent Beshore: No, I totally understand. Private equity does not have a fantastic reputation, and for good reason. A lot of the way private equity goes about things involves the wrong incentives—that’s the easiest way to describe it.

I didn’t get into private equity by working at another firm. I got into it because I was an entrepreneur. I founded some businesses, and then I accidentally bought a business—actually one in St. Louis—fifteen years ago. That really opened my eyes to a whole world of opportunities to help transition family-owned businesses.

The traditional playbook for doing that, which is called private equity, is based on the model KKR, one of the big private equity firms, pioneered in the ’80s. There’s a really interesting book called Barbarians at the Gate—

Dan Doriani: Yes.

Brent Beshore: —about the RJR Nabisco deal. The model is to buy a company with as much debt as you possibly can, and so put in as little equity as possible. When you think of equity, think of the equity in your home. If you buy a home, how much do you put down—40%, 20%, 10%—

Dan Doriani: Twenty percent, or five.

Brent Beshore: Exactly. Private equity is the same idea: they’re buying a business and trying to use as little equity as they can, because if the business goes well and increases a lot in valuation—

Dan Doriani: You leverage that.

Brent Beshore: —then their equity is worth a lot more. So traditionally, private equity buys a business like that, puts a lot of debt on it, and then usually tries to make the financials look better. How do you do that? You can either increase the top line—revenue growth and gross profit growth—or you can cut expenses. Which is easier?

Dan Doriani: It’s easier to cut expenses by laying people off.

Brent Beshore: Exactly. So they look for opportunities to make the business more efficient. And by the way, sometimes businesses do need to get a lot more efficient, so it’s not all bad—but that’s not our method, either. Then, often within a short period, they try to sell it to somebody else. We call it the “buy, lever, strip, and flip” model. You lever it up with a lot of debt—

Dan Doriani: I just want to make sure people understand. “Strip” means not only laying off workers; it can also mean stripping out assets—land, a building, or an investment that isn’t paying off yet.

Brent Beshore: That’s exactly right. You’re trying to make the business appear as financially successful as you possibly can, as quickly as you can, and then sell it to somebody else, capture the difference between what you bought it for and what you sold it for, pay back the debt you put on the business, and then your equity is worth a lot more.

The challenge is this: who benefits from that model? Probably the seller, who sold the business for a lot of money, and the buyer, who bought it and flipped it for a lot of money. Everyone else loses. As we know, the only way to play long-term games successfully is if everyone wins. But they’re not playing long-term; they’re playing short-term. Often that’s because the LPs—the investors in private equity—allow them to have the capital only for a short period.

Dan Doriani: Tell me what an LP is.

Brent Beshore: A limited partner—an investor. Say a college endowment or a family gives capital to an investor and says, “Use our money, pair it with your own money, and give it back to us within a fairly short period of time.”

Dan Doriani: So that’s why you have to flip it. You have to get rid of it fast.

Permanent Equity [04:50]

Brent Beshore: That’s exactly right. All that is background to say that Permanent Equity is in many ways the inverse of traditional private equity. We buy with no intention of selling the business. We typically use no debt in our transactions. We hold indefinitely.

Dan Doriani: Let me set this up—you’re doing a great job, but let’s slow down, because not everybody understands this. Your conviction is to turn it on its head, to do almost exactly the opposite. You don’t want to flip it or sell it fast. You want to keep it. In one of your podcasts or blogs, you talked about a 30-year relationship, and another caught my attention: a 27-year relationship—”I’m not going to hurry into a 30-year relationship.” That’s almost antithetical to ordinary private equity. Why do you do that? What convictions drive it?

Brent Beshore: For one, our investors enable it. They give us their capital for 30 years, so we’re never a forced seller or a forced buyer on the front end. We can just do whatever makes sense for the good of the business.

My personal conviction is that I don’t think there’s a way to form good long-term relationships or make good long-term decisions with short-term capital. As followers of Jesus, we should have the longest time horizon of anyone; ours should extend to eternity. And when you put the constraints of finance and private equity on things, it’s really difficult to treat each other as made in the image of God. With those constraints and incentives, it’s much easier to treat each other as a means to an end.

Dan Doriani: Or as an asset to be exploited or used.

Brent Beshore: Exactly. That comes naturally. And look, I don’t want those pulls on my life. I have plenty of brokenness the Lord is working out; I don’t need more incentives to do the wrong thing. So we take very seriously making sure our incentives are aligned to do the right thing, not only by our investors but by the people we work with. Life’s too short. We want to win together long-term, form long-term successful relationships, and not win at somebody else’s expense.

That means taking into account all the stakeholders at the table. It’s not just the buyer and the seller. It’s the leadership team, the employees, the communities they’re in, maybe regulators, the vendors, the customers. So we try to stretch the time horizon until it’s functionally indefinite—hence the name Permanent Equity. It has a better ring than “Semi-Permanent Equity,” since obviously nothing on this earth is permanent. And we just try to do things the way we feel called to do them.

Dan Doriani: I’m jotting notes as you speak. I teach ethics, and one thing I sometimes say is that we want to make it easy to do the right thing. You’re saying, “Let’s align the incentives with treating people well.” You not only want to treat people well; it’s easier to treat people well when you have a long-term horizon. Second, we pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” You’re not going to set yourself up for the temptation to make a quick buck by laying off people whose lives might be ruined and who really shouldn’t be laid off. And third, love your neighbor as yourself. In your field you talk about stakeholders—owners, people who’ve worked there a long time, suppliers, and of course investors. In some way they’re all your neighbors. You’re trying to take care of all your stakeholders, not just your limited partners. Does that sound right?

Going with the Grain [08:45]

Brent Beshore: Correct. And the idea is that if we go with the grain of the universe as God has created it, the returns are actually better, not worse, in the long term. You’ll always have short-term trade-offs. But I’ve found that my career took off when I started following the word of God. It’s undeniable: if we can operate within the way God designed us to operate, there’s a flourishing that I just don’t think can occur any other way. And I don’t mean just financial flourishing. I mean relational flourishing, and enjoying the work we do. Work is pre-fall, for our good and for God’s glory. It’s not something we need to suffer through. There will be thistles and thorns—we live in a Genesis 3 world—but we can work with trust, knowing we’re trying to honor God in the process.

That radiates outward into a flourishing we want for people not just at the office. We want them to have better relationships with their families and better marriages as a result of working with us. We don’t always do that, and we often have to say we’re sorry. But that’s the aim.

Dan Doriani: Equity used to be one of those fields—I’ve known people who worked in it—where people work 80 hours a week and burn out after five years. You’re trying to have a sane schedule. You’re married, and you have—I’ve read about you—four kids?

Brent Beshore: Four kids.

Dan Doriani: And your fourth child was born relatively recently?

Brent Beshore: That’s correct—my son, Silas.

From Cynical Atheist to Believer [10:15]

Dan Doriani: Let me recommend not only your book but, for anybody in finance, the Permanent Equity website. There aren’t a lot of Brent Beshores in the world. If you look up Brent Beshore and Permanent Equity, you’ll find a lot of content on their site; it’s easy to find under “Content,” with blogs and philosophy. After a while, you started writing about your personal story. You were doing really well. In one piece you said that at 28 you were making a million dollars a year. You’d been to the White House. You had a “bright and hot” wife—those are your words, not mine—but she didn’t always do everything the way you wanted. You weren’t pleased with your life. You didn’t want kids, maybe because they’d get in the way; I don’t know. Then something happened. In 2007 things changed with regard to your career, but you also went from a cynical atheist to a believer. Would you tell us a little of your story?

Brent Beshore: Man, I tell you what: when I see people who seem far from the faith, it gives me hope, because if Jesus can come for me, I feel like he can come for anybody. If you’d met me in my mid- to late twenties, my life now would be unrecognizable by comparison.

I told my mom I didn’t believe in God when I was nine. I distinctly remember: we were in Joplin, Missouri, where I grew up, driving past the Carl Richards Bowling Alley, and I said, “I don’t believe in God.” She said, “Well, everyone has to make up their own mind on these matters.” My brother was in the back seat, and he started crying.

Dan Doriani: Was he older or younger than you?

Brent Beshore: Younger, by about three and a half years. Such a sweet guy. The whole thing just never made much sense to me. I’m sure I heard the gospel. We’d go to church, and I’d hear a lot about Jesus’s blood, but I didn’t really understand what any of it meant. I thought you had to be a good person to earn God’s love and affection, and I thought, “How in the world do you know you’ve earned enough of it?” And I looked at the lives of people around me who professed to be religious, and their lives just didn’t look that different from people who didn’t ascribe anything to faith. So it seemed like a big waste of time, to be honest.

I also realized early on that things went better for me if I achieved things and won things. So my childhood and my twenties were all about winning and achieving. That’s what you referenced: I got to 28, and I’d won a lot of the games I’d set out to win. God has such a funny way of working. I deserved to be smitten. If you looked at what I professed, I was an enemy of God. I was far from God, living for myself, and I was not kind. Instead of taking things away from me, he gave me more than I could have dreamed. At 28 I was making more money than I ever thought I’d make. I had a beautiful wife who loved me and friends who liked me. And man, I just felt hollow and empty inside. Everything was gray. It was what I think people describe as a midlife crisis; I just happened to have it in my late twenties. It was accelerated.

Dan Doriani: So you had your faith crisis at eight or nine instead of seventeen or eighteen, and your midlife crisis at 28.

Brent Beshore: That’s exactly it.

Dan Doriani: How old are you now, may I ask? You don’t seem very old.

Brent Beshore: I’m 42. Around that time, I started meeting people whose lives looked so different. They seemed joyful, relaxed, and genuinely loving. I’d ask, “What do you have that I don’t?” And they’d say, “Oh, I follow Jesus.” And I’d say, “You’ve got to be kidding me. What in the world are you talking about?” I got to know some of them, and they were really smart and well read. We’d spar on a lot of these topics. I’d say, “No, you don’t have it right,” and they’d say, “You’re not as well educated as you think you are. You need to go read more.” I really enjoyed it.

There’s a particular pastor, Dave Cover, whom I think you know. I remember him sitting down with me that first time for probably two or two and a half hours, and we just went at it. He very much held his own, as Dave does.

Dan Doriani: He’s gifted.

Brent Beshore: He became a mentor of mine, and I’m so grateful for how he poured into me. I actually heard the gospel for the first time in his men’s group. I distinctly remember where we were—at a restaurant. Somebody said something about needing to do better, and I said, “Yeah, I’m really working on doing things better, too”—something about earning God’s affection. And they said, “You know that’s not the gospel.” And I said, “Wait, what?”

Dan Doriani: There’s nothing like a good mistake corrected on the spot to get our attention.

Brent Beshore: For sure. That set me off. It was like a shock wave through my life. It was a couple of years of intense study, and God went from being an impossibility to a plausibility to a probability. I remember the day I came home and said to my wife, “It’s all true, and it changes everything.”

Dan Doriani: Yes, it does. But it’s also true, as I read about your work—and I have friends who know your work; they told me to contact you in the first place—that some aspects of the faith resonated with the way God made you. In various pieces you say you hate debt and you hate stress. Of course, leveraged buyouts with 5% down are stressful and debt-laden. You want to build businesses the way they should be built. You loved your wife; you didn’t want kids right away, and now you’re delighted to have them. You like to build things, and to build them for the long term. That seems to have been part of who you are for a long time—maybe the way God made you. So you got into the equity field in this alternative way that is Christian, but that also seems to be the way God influenced you before you were a believer. Maybe you fell into it a little. You talk about aligning the investor and the company, which is a very Christian concept: “Can two walk together unless they are agreed?” as one translation puts it. And everybody who talks about making the world work says things like, “Take your time; don’t talk people into things; actually explore an issue carefully.” So your faith seems to help you become the truest version of yourself.

Brent Beshore: Amen. Isn’t that true for all of us? Can we live as the true version of ourselves without that? I don’t think so. I think that’s what we’re made for. And I’m functionally unemployable outside my current context. I don’t think I’d last a week working somewhere else. So I don’t have many other options, and I’m glad God put me where he put me.

Secular Language, Christian Ideas [17:45]

Dan Doriani: I think you could probably be employed somewhere else, but we’ll let that go for now. One thing I notice about your website and writing is that you use secular-sounding language for concepts that are Christian. For example, in one place you say that if you want a good business, don’t be a jerk. That could be translated “love your neighbor”—it’s the negative form. Don’t be transactional. Don’t treat people as a means to an end; treat them as an end. You could be quoting Immanuel Kant there—I don’t know whether you deliberately are. He wasn’t a Christian, of course, but that’s one place where his values align closely with Christianity: people are ends in themselves. It’s a way of describing Christlike love. I think you try to use secular language to convey Christian ideas. Why do you do that?

Brent Beshore: Obviously I’m a follower of Jesus. But I don’t think there’s any such thing as a Christian company. No company can give its life to Christ; it’s just a collection of people. One of the things I love most, from when I started learning about Jesus, is that he didn’t just hang out with the religious elites. He made contact with the world and spent time with people the world cast away. So I try not to create barriers to people working with us, or learning about Jesus—maybe indirectly, through the experience they have with us.

It’s easy to fall into “Christianese,” where you’re constantly using Christian language. I’m sensitive to that because—

Dan Doriani: It’s alienating to secular people.

Brent Beshore: I would have been alienated by it. So as we craft the language we use, I try to make it an invitation for people to ask deeper questions. And people do. One of my favorite things about my work is that we get to work with people of all different faith backgrounds and all different levels of comfort with Christianity. People will say, “Wait a minute—why do you do that? Why do you say that?” And then I get to earn the right to tell them the truth that’s underneath it. So instead of saying, “We’re made in the image of God, and here’s how we’re doing it,” we say something everyone can agree on: “Be kind. Don’t be a jerk.”

Dan Doriani: And don’t be transactional with people.

Brent Beshore: Don’t be transactional. You can make a financial transaction, but don’t be transactional with people. And that begs the question: well, why not? Why shouldn’t we do that? And then there’s a deeper conversation to be had. With all our language, I want to make sure nothing is obviously incompatible with what Jesus says. To my knowledge, nothing we do is, at least outwardly. Our aim is to serve the Lord. But when you read our website, the direction it comes from isn’t abundantly obvious. There are a lot of shared values and shared wisdom across faith backgrounds. I’ve met lots of atheists who share many of the same values we do. The question is just why. Is it just a preference, or is there something deeper underneath? That’s where I love to get into it: “Hey, you and I have a lot in common. That’s great. What do you root that in? Why do you say it’s better to treat somebody well than poorly?” And then you get into questions of apologetics.

Dan Doriani: Although, of course, lately there are studies indicating that treating people well—not stripping out wealth as fast as possible, not looking for a rapid flip—pays off. There are even questions about whether quarterly earnings reporting is best, because it keeps people short-term instead of long-term. So secular people will align with you, and more people have found that the long term pays off, and that investing in honest companies pays off as well, maybe even better. But not everybody buys that. Some people go for the quick return.

Going Public with Faith [21:40]

Dan Doriani: Let me ask a different question. In 2024 you started talking more overtly about your faith. Your 2024 year-end letter included a little review of your marriage, which implied that since you started following Jesus you’re less selfish, and it celebrated the birth of another child after you’d said at one point that you didn’t want children at all. I laughed when I saw a term I’d never seen before—”Onederland,” spelled with O-N-E rather than W-O-N—because when you were younger you were pretty reckless with your body and overweight for a long time, and you’ve gotten below 200 pounds. That’s Onederland. And you say explicitly that you were an atheist who used to mock Christians, but God rescued you, and he is now the cornerstone of your life. You’ve been implicit about your faith, and Christian values run through what you do. What made you decide to be more explicit? Maybe I’m wrong and you were always that explicit, but I think you shifted toward a more explicit expression of your faith.

Brent Beshore: I remember it was probably 2017 or ’18. I came to faith a little over eleven years ago, and I was kind of closeted in my faith for the first three or four years. In the world I live in, it’s just not a common topic. It’s about making money, doing worldly things, and playing worldly games. I remember talking with some dear friends, including Dave Cover, whom I mentioned earlier, and saying, “I think I’m ready to start talking about this publicly.” So it’s been probably seven years or so, maybe a bit longer, since I started talking publicly about my faith. I talk about it a decent amount on social media.

As I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve become more willing to be vulnerable about my shortcomings, to help other people see through the lie that if people really know you—including your shortcomings—you’ll be rejected, you’ll be alone, and people won’t care about you. I want to show that my experience, which I think reflects the beauty of grace flowing through us, is the exact opposite. The more I can be known for who I really am, including my hopes and dreams but also my shortcomings and failures, the more people are drawn to the authenticity and realness of it.

My hope is that by sharing my struggles, I might open the door for others to reach out. To your point, I write an annual letter once a year, and after the one you read from last year, a lot of people reached out about everything from the health-related things I mentioned to children. I’ve been public about struggles I’ve had in my marriage in the past, and about some real healing there that I’m so grateful for. We’ve talked about miscarriages we’ve had, and a lot of men reached out and said, “I’d never talked about this with anybody. I didn’t even know it was something you could talk about.” So I’m trying to open the door and shift the Overton window a little on what’s allowed to be talked about, especially in finance, which has historically been very sterile. That’s my goal: to serve people and to be not only somebody who’s great at their job—and we’re aiming to be great at private equity and do it the right way—but also to be human, and to say, “No matter what your job is, no matter where God has put you and what he’s given you to steward, you can also just be a human and talk about real things.”

Dan Doriani: Boy, we have a lot of shared experiences. For what it’s worth, a number of years ago we lost a child through miscarriage. I went looking for literature and literally couldn’t find anything, so I said, “I’m a writer. I’m going to write about this.” It’s either the most or the second-most republished thing I’ve ever written. I wrote it 35 years ago, and people still write me notes saying, “Remember that thing you wrote? Can you send me a copy? My friend needs it.”

And for what it’s worth, I wasn’t an atheist, but I was a heavy agnostic, and I was kind of hoping Christianity wouldn’t be true. At the age of eight, I heard from my Sunday school teacher that if I became a Christian, I would get to live on a cloud, play a harp, and sing songs to Jesus without a body. And I thought, “I don’t want any part of that.”

Brent Beshore: That doesn’t sound great, does it?

Dan Doriani: That is not a future an eight-year-old boy who likes sports has any interest in. So I was an agnostic, much like you. And I think so many of us find that when we’re more honest about our feelings, we find more friends, not fewer. Nobody likes to be with somebody who seems perfect, because they’re not perfect themselves, and it’s nice to know you’re not perfect either. So we have a lot of common threads, and it’s great that you have expertise in your field that makes people want to talk to you about these matters. I’m grateful for that.

Main Street Summit [26:50]

Dan Doriani: You also have some conferences. One coming up is called Main Street, and it’s for entrepreneurs. It started off as, I guess, an ordinary conference on finance, equity, and business, and then at some point it added a Christian track. My friend Sarah Zauster will be there, my friend Mark Vroegop will be there, and I’ll be there. We’ll all be speaking to entrepreneurs. Number one, why did you start a conference in the first place? And number two, why did you add a Christian track?

Brent Beshore: As Christians, hospitality is one of the highest callings we can have, and we’re called to live in community. I think one of the things people are desperate for these days is real community—not the fake, cotton-candy community social media can provide. It’s called Main Street Summit: more than 1,000 people gathering in Columbia, Missouri, November 4th through 6th, for owners, operators, and investors in small and medium-sized businesses. It brings together people who are in the trenches every day, really trying to battle it out. It’s hard to run a small business, and we wanted to give people a platform to get to know one another and genuinely become friends.

One thing you’ll hear when I take the stage to make introductions is that a lot of business conferences are about transactions: how do you come in and get more? My hope for people who attend Main Street Summit is that they gain a friend. And you don’t gain a friend by trying to get as much as you can. You gain a friend by trying to serve, figuring out how to help people, and being honest about who you really are. That’s the tone we try to strike.

This is the third year we’ve done it. Each year a lot of my friends, many of whom are Christians, have come. This is the first year we’ve done an overtly faith-and-work track. We’re really trying to explore the intersection of faith and work and bring in people like you to help people understand what it means to be excellent at our work, and also excellent in the theology of our work—to understand the why underneath it. Why do we get up and do what we do the way we do it? What do we do when we have a moral conflict in the business? How do we treat employees with dignity? Should we be making a profit? Should we be making more profit than we’re making? What do we do with those profits? Are we just called to make as much money as we can and give it away? Those are the kinds of questions we want to explore for people interested in the intersection of faith and work. That’s the track you’re coming in for. I couldn’t be more grateful, and my hope is that you’ll make a new friend or two while you’re in town—and the same for everyone else.

Dan Doriani: I’m hoping to bring a couple of people with me, too, and to stay as long as I can. I can’t stay the whole time because I have another job—which is to say, I’m not an entrepreneur and don’t run a business. But I’ll stay as long as I can and try to meet some people and make some friends.

Advice for the Early Career [30:15]

Dan Doriani: I know you’re only 42. I was guessing about 40 from your face—or maybe 39—

Brent Beshore: Oh, I thought you were going to say 33.

Dan Doriani: That’s what I meant to say.

Brent Beshore: Here’s twenty bucks. Appreciate that.

Dan Doriani: Let’s imagine you’re speaking to someone getting started in your field. They might be 23 or 33. They’ve found that their first job isn’t the one for them. You have seventy seconds, walking to the car: “Brent, you hosted this. Give me your best wisdom.” What would you say?

Brent Beshore: First, I’d say that who you do things with is way more important than what you’re doing, especially in your early twenties. Make sure you’re in an environment where you can learn a lot—both what to do and what not to do—and where you get to try and taste a lot of different things. That’s a primary piece of advice.

I’d also say: treat everything you do as if it’s the most important job in the world. We’re called to do whatever our hands find to do as unto the Lord, with excellence. We worship a God who is excellent, and being made in his image, we have excellence put into us. Sometimes we forget that. We think some tasks are important and others aren’t. One of the most encouraging things about working with anybody, especially younger people, is when they take a job that doesn’t seem that important very seriously and do it with excellence. I can tell you that those are the people who get given more and more. It’s the stewardship principle: if you can steward a little, you can steward more, and if you can’t steward a little, even that gets taken away. God tells us this, and I think it works the same way in business.

The more you can be a person of high integrity—just doing what you say you’ll do, when you say you’ll do it, every single time—the better. In your early twenties, that kind of reliability is far more important than being on the “right track” or having the most prestige. Most people in their early twenties seem to be optimizing for impressiveness—especially for impressing the opposite sex at a bar. I think that’s exactly the wrong approach. Align yourself with people you can have a deep relationship with, learn from, and soak in, and then do everything you’re called to do with excellence. The rest will take care of itself. I’ve never seen anybody do that and not turn out pretty well.

Dan Doriani: I agree with you. Let me underscore it by saying it a slightly different way. Do your job really well; people will notice. Then, if you want to do something different, volunteer. People will take you up on the offer, and you can do well at that. If you want to get out of what you’re doing now, or some aspect of it, do everything you’re supposed to do, and then do something else besides. If you’re really good at that, people may say, “This is a higher-order task, and you’re doing it well. What can we take off your plate so you can do more of this higher-order work?” Don’t ask to get out of things. Ask to do something more after you’ve proven yourself.

Brent Beshore: I’d add one more. There’s a temptation to look at the world as a big place full of people to transact with, where you can use people and spit them out and it won’t matter, because you’re playing a one-time game. I’ve found the exact opposite to be true. The world is a lot smaller than we think, and the way God has created it, people keep popping up in your life. So never burn a bridge. Treat people really, really well, even if they don’t deserve it. Exit things well. Have people say nice things about you—not out of fear of man, but because you honored them and honored the position you were in. That will catch up with you in all the best ways, and the opposite will catch up with you in all the worst ways.

Five Years from Now [34:35]

Dan Doriani: One last question. Are you ready?

Brent Beshore: I’m ready.

Dan Doriani: Five years from now, what would you like to look back on and celebrate?

Brent Beshore: Truly, the most important thing in my life is my marriage and my family. It hasn’t always been that way. But if my marriage is in a great spot, I can withstand almost anything, and it makes everything else seem easy. So I really want to keep investing in my marriage and in my children’s lives. I’ve got young kids. Five years from now, my oldest daughter will be sixteen, and I’ll have only a few years left with her at home. I really want to make the next five years count with my family—and obviously do a great job at work as well, but in a way that honors my marriage and my family along the way.

Dan Doriani: I love that answer. Brent, thanks for your time, your work, and the blogs you write. They’re interesting. If you’re in finance, or just want to know more about it, let me recommend Permanent Equity one more time. It’s easy to find online. If you can’t find it right away, search for “Brent Beshore Permanent Equity” and click “Content,” and you’ll find some interesting pieces that go deeper into the topics we covered today. Thank you for coming. May God bless you, and I look forward to seeing you before too long at Main Street.

Brent Beshore: A couple of weeks. Appreciate it, sir. Thank you.

Working with Dan Doriani is a production of the Center for Faith and Work St. Louis. We seek to promote faithfulness in the workplace, in education, in discipleship, and in the stories of believers who’ve applied their faith at work. If you want to put your faith to work and change your corner of the world, visit faithandworkstl.org. We’ll help you start a cohort with like-minded believers who also want to practice their faith at work. This podcast is donor-supported; to keep us going, please donate on our website. Maybe more importantly, you can support us by listening, subscribing, sharing, and posting about us on your favorite platform—or go old school and tell a friend.